President Joe Biden likes to warn us about a rising tide of “autocracy” worldwide, but the greatest danger to democracy lately comes from those who claim to be defending it.
The latest example was the response of Democrats and journalists to Tucker Carlson’s release of new video footage of the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. They demanded the video be censored, and that News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch pull Carlson off the air.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D) — one of the most powerful people in the U.S. government — stood up in Congress on Tuesday and said: “Mr. Carlson … is going to come back tonight with another segment. Fox News should tell him not to. Fox News, Rupert Murcoch: tell Carlson not to run a second segment of lies!”
Schumer repeated his demand in a press conference, adding that “democracy depends” on censoring the video:
Schumer’s demand was a direct attack on the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which not only guards freedom of the press, but specifically restrains Congress itself from interfering with it: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
Schumer violated the Constitution — and, arguably, his oath to defend it. And he had the chutzpah to declare that he was doing so to defend our democracy.
Not to be outdone, Democrats on the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government used a hearing Thursday to attack freedom of the press, to defend censorship on social media, and to attack the journalists who worked on the “Twitter Files.”
The party line seems to be as follows: There is no government censorship, because Twitter is a private company, but to the extent that there is censorship, we need more of it.
Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX) seemed stunned when Taibbi informed him that hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, and that free speech includes “the right to be wrong.”
Taibbi himself was wrong — very wrong — when he celebrated the death of Andrew Breitbart in 2012, with the cool kids at Rolling Stone. I’m sure he’d reconsider that view today: he, like Andrew, has learned how much the left really cares about democracy.
True, there is a distinction between liberty and democracy. The former refers to the freedom of the individual; the latter is just majority rule, which — as Socrates found out the hard way – can destroy liberty, if unrestrained.
But the form of democracy we embrace in our constitutional republic is one in which majority rule is tempered by a Bill of Rights. What Schumer demanded was a more direct assault on democracy than the Capitol riot.
Schumer recently (and appropriately) expressed support for Israel’s ceremonial president, Isaac Herzog, as he tries to forge a compromise between the government and the opposition over proposed judicial reforms.
For the past several weeks, left-wing protesters in Israel — funded, in part, by left-wing donors in the U.S. and even by the U.S. government — have taken to the streets. Some have encouraged boycotts and even military desertion.
They, too, claim to be defending “democracy.” But they are doing the opposite, in two ways.
First, the effect of the reforms would be to increase the power of the legislature to hold the judiciary in check — i.e. it to increase democracy.
Second, the protesters are rejecting the authority of Israel’s newly-elected democratic government. They are using undemocratic means — chaos in the streets, threats to the country — to thwart the people’s will.
In both the U.S. and Israel, those who claim to be defending democracy are actually opposed to it. What they mean by “democracy” is the right of the left to rule, forever, as the sole legitimate representative of “the people,” whether the people like it or not.
Hence the irony in that several Democrats on the January 6 Committee, who themselves disputed past elections when Republicans won, tried to condemn those who disputed the 2020 vote.
Carlson’s version of events is just one side of the story. But it was a side that was suppressed when Democrats excluded pro-Trump Republicans from the January 6 Committee, and hid the full video of the riot, choosing to release only selected (and deceptively edited) footage.
Let the full video record emerge — and let the public be wary of autocratic politicians who crush our freedoms while cloaking themselves in democracy’s moral virtue.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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